God Brought Afghanistan to Her

Dannah Gresh: Do you remember when news headlines were filled with reports of the U.S. pulling out of Afghanistan? Here’s what that time was like for Brooke Keeney in Houston.

Brooke Keeney: And she said, “The Taliban is coming! The Taliban is coming! My family is there! My family is there! They’re going door to door! They’re going door to door! You have to get them out!”

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, co-author of You Can Trust God to Write Your Story for May 2, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Can you imagine God using you to share His love with the people of Afghanistan?

That may seem out of the question or impossible, but today we’re all going to be challenged as we hear how God can use women like you and me to engage with people in hard-to-reach places if we’re just willing to say, “Yes, Lord. Here I am. I’m available.” And then watch how He is working around us and join our hearts with His heart for those around us who need Jesus.

Our guest today is Brooke Keeney. She’s a wife, and she’s a mom who was just living a normal life in the Houston area when God began to stir in her heart a love for people of other nations. And then God started supernaturally, unexpectedly, to bring the nations to her, particularly people from Afghanistan.

You’ll hear more how that happened in this amazing story about how God can use women who may think of themselves as being unremarkable, and yet, God can use them in remarkable ways. As you listen, keep in mind that God may want to use you to do remarkable things by His power, through His grace, to build His kingdom. Let’s listen.

Dannah: We can’t wait to tell you this story. It all started when Brooke Keeney and their family decided they’d outgrown a baby bed. They decided to donate it to another family that needed it.

Brooke: We decided to donate that through a ministry at our church. And one of the things they do is they help refugee families in the Houston area.

When my husband brought it there, he said, “Can anyone use this little bed?”

A lady there said, “Yes, we have a refugee family that’s from Afghanistan, and they have four little kids, and the two-year-old needs a bed.”

And so my husband said, “I know my wife’s going to be all over that. She loves refugees and missions and wants our family to serve more, so we’ll go and deliver it to the refugee family.”

The area where they were living in Houston is not nice. They’re small apartments. I think they were a family of six—the mom and the dad, and then they had four little kids. If I remember correctly, it was a one-bedroom apartment. So the parents and two of the kids slept all in one bed, and then we brought the little toddler bed, and I think the other ones slept on the floor. There definitely was not enough room for six people.

Dannah: Brooke had a hard time seeing needs like this and not doing something about it. For one thing, God had given her a compassionate heart, eager to help people, and He had also used Revive Our Hearts to stir that passion over the years.

Brooke: I’d been praying for ways for our family to serve and to love and kind of get outside of our bubble that we’re in. We’re in Christian school. We’re at church. We read the Bible at home. But I really wanted our family to serve and to be grateful and thankful for the things God had given us and to share that with our neighbors.

So we started, “If you meet one refugee family, you meet another, and another.” So we, along with Houston’s First Baptist, just started having teas for the women. They would come, and we would do a craft and have tea and then there would be some sort of small gospel presentation or a truth from God’s Word that was presented.

We started building relationships with refugee families over a span of about four years.

We saw the Body of Christ come around to help and to love and to serve the refugees in our community and to treat them with value and dignity as people created in the image of God not just, like, a bothersome addendum to our community but to really show them, “You are loved. You do have value. And God does have a purpose for you being here.”

Dannah: You’re listening to Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. I’m Dannah Gresh.

All month we’ve been returning to a theme here on Revive Our Hearts about women who know that in themselves they’re unremarkable. We’re just regular women. But when they open themselves up to the will of God, He can do remarkable things.

Those remarkable things may include serving at home, serving behind the scenes at church, or visiting nursing homes—all remarkable things that don’t get any spotlight.

So far today we’ve heard the story of Brooke Keeney. She was just a regular woman, keeping her home running. But God put a remarkable burden on her heart to serve refugees who were coming to the Houston area.

When the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, this story became even more remarkable.

Brooke: Because we had developed relationships with our refugee friends, they had grown to trust us and to love us, so they started calling us. I have a specific memory.

I was at our parent’s house, and one of our friends (and I won’t share her name), but she called me in a panic.

And she said, “The Taliban is coming! The Taliban is coming! My family is there! My family is there! They’re going door to door! They’re going door to door! You have to get them out!”

And so, a lot of times, the refugees, because I’m an American, they automatically assume I have some sort of authority or connection to the State Department, or I could just get on a plane and bring them over.

I told her, I said, “I’m just me. I don’t have any authority or jurisdiction.”

And I just sensed the Lord being, like, “But wait. I have direct access to the King of kings who can deliver you from anything.”

And so I told her, “I told you this many times, my friend. You have got to call on Jesus. I know that’s not what you believe in your heart, but I’ve shared that with you, and that is the hope for your family. That’s your rescue. That’s your way out.”

She’s not a believer, but I said, “We’re praying for you.” I shared with her a story from the Bible where I said God can blind their eyes. When Peter was going out of the jail, they didn’t see him. I said, “I’m just going to pray that over your family.”

And then fast forward a year later, her family has now gotten out. I think they’re in Abu Dhabi waiting to get resettled in Germany. I was like, “God answered your prayer! Why didn’t you tell me that? A whole year has gone by. We’ve been praying for your family to be delivered. God did that for you.”

She’s still not a believer, but we’re just sharing with her, “God is involved. He sees your family. He sees you, and He cares about you. You’re not just a random refugee living in some yucky apartment in Houston. You’re a person of infinite worth to the God who created you.”

So my Afghan friend called me, and she said, “Miss Brooke, Miss Brooke, you have to come. They’ve dropped six families in our apartment, and they don’t have anything.”

And I said, “You don’t have anything? What do you mean?”

“They don’t have anything.”

The United States was so overwhelmed with the Afghan refugees coming and getting moved off of the military bases, they were dropping them in cities that were not ready for them. The government system just literally failed. They were dropping families in apartments late at night with nothing—no food, no beds—no nothing.

So there were these six families, and I said, “Okay. Aboard. What do you want us to do?”

So it literally started with six families. I texted six friends, and I said, “I need you’all. Who can take one family?” And I said, “These are their kids. These are their clothes sizes. This is the food they need.”

So we just went family by family. So six families, it just kept growing and growing and growing. They all came to different military bases in the U.S., and they’d get vetted and processed and vaccinated, and all the things—I don’t even know all the different checklists they had to go through. Then they would just put them in this city and that city. We’d just keep hearing about people.

Then once you’ve built trust with a couple of families, then when a new family would arrive, they would say, “Oh, the Christians will help you.”

So you almost kind of started developing this, like, rapport with the families when they couldn’t get a hold of their case worker. One time I got a text. It was, like, “Hello, Ma'am. We heard that you were helping all homeless and all refugees in Houston.”

I just started laughing. We weren’t helping all refugees, but it was just in his broken English and the text, “Hello, Ma'am, could you visit us? We heard you and your husband will help all refugees and homeless people.”

We’re not an organization. We’re just a body of believers and families and churches that just started rallying around. People would ask, “What organization are you with?”

And I’m, like, “We’re followers of Jesus the Messiah, and we’re coming here to serve you in His name. We love you, and we’re glad that you’re here. I don’t have a business card. I’m not with a 501C3. We’re just a regular family that just loves Jesus and loves you guys, and we want to welcome you to our country. We’re so sorry and sad for all the sorrow that you’ve had in your whole life, but we are glad that you’re here and can pray for you.”

I think the hardest thing for me, as a mom, with my own children is families that were separated.

There was one man that came, and he had to leave his wife who was in labor at the moment when the Taliban was taking over. He had been high up in the army, so his commander was, like, “You have to get out. They’re going to kill you.”

And he’s, like, “My wife’s in labor.”

They said, “Well, you’re not going to do her any good if you’re killed.”

So he got on a plane and left his wife who was in labor and his two-year-old daughter, and left them there. Yes, there were families that were separated. People who had gotten shot and had just seen the trauma of war and then the trauma of leaving their country and leaving everything that they had.

One of the families we met, they made it to the airport in Kabul. They had their suitcases. And whoever was loading the plane said, “It’s you or the bags.” And he said, “We dropped everything and got on the plane.” They left everything they had ever owned or known.

I think people don’t realize there were people in Afghanistan that had homes and jobs, and their kids went to school. They had a lot of money, and they had made a good life for themselves there over the last twenty years, and they left it all. They were lawyers and doctors and nurses and business people and worked for the embassy. They left all of their things, moved to Houston to just some cockroach-infested apartment with nothing.

That’s humbling if you know the Lord and if you don’t know Jesus, like, I don’t know how they coped. That’s one of the saddest things that we’ve seen.

We’ve seen depression and suicide of the Afghan refugees as they’ve come to Houston because their hearts are still the same. A different location doesn’t change who you are at the core. So that darkness that they’ve had under oppressive governments and living their entire lives in civil war and poverty and the crushing darkness of Islam, they brought that with them. They don’t know how to sort that out as they’re sitting in the apartments with nothing and no job and don’t understand the language or the culture.

So it was almost like I needed the church to multiply rapidly because you’re, like, “There are people that are literally, spiritually and physically, dying, and they’ve come to our city. We can’t just sit and sip our Starbucks. We have to go and be Jesus and the hands and feet. We just have to do that.”

A man that we visited, he had lost both of his legs. He was a bomb defuser. He worked with the U.S. military. He said, “One day I was just going through. And I went click-click-click, and I defused this one, defused this one, defused this one. And I sat back, and I heard another click, and I knew I missed one.”

He was very matter of fact. He lost both of his legs. He’s a father. He had three or four kids. I mean, my jaw was just dropping because he just had joy and peace while he was sharing this story. And finally he said, “Okay, I’ve told you some of my story. Can you tell me some of yours?”

So I was, like, “Help me” just praying, like, “What should we share? What should we share?” And so the lady that was with me said, “Well, we’re followers of Jesus the Messiah. And in our holy book, the Bible, in the New Testament, God tells us that we’re to love God with all our hearts, and we’re also to love our neighbor as ourselves. And so you are our neighbor because you’ve come to our city. And so we’ve come here to love you in the name of Jesus.”

And the man sat back, and he said, “This is a very good teaching. I like this Jesus.”

And so we said, “Yes! Yes! He is more than a good teacher.”

And just these little seeds that we’re just hoping to bring forth fruit at God’s time.

And then, this was actually this week, I went with a friend who speaks the language to visit a family that we’ve ministered to several times. We’ve helped with small things—register their kids for school, and helped them get backpacks, and helped them get food—just small things, just learning how to navigate life in America.

And she said to my friend, “She is married to a very good man, and she is a good woman, and they have good children.”

And he said, “Oh, yes, but God is good. We are not good in and of ourselves.”

And she said, “My husband and I have said many times that if we make it to heaven, we know that you will be there.”

So my friend immediately sensed the opportunity, “This is the moment to share with her.” And she said, “If we see you in heaven, it will only be because of Jesus, and that is why we are going to heaven. We will be in heaven, and we only know that because of Jesus. Any goodness that you see is because of Jesus.”

You’re talking to people that maybe have never met a believer in their life. They’ve never heard anything about the name of Jesus. Many of the women are illiterate. They never went to school. And so, the enemy I believe has tried to use that to keep the women in the darkness. They don’t even have a concept of thinking about things of eternity because they have no basis for that. They’ve never read a book. They’ve never been to school. They’ve only lived in their small village in Afghanistan.

And now they’re coming to America. Their kids are going to the schools. It’s opening up this whole new world. You can see their minds start to think and process things. I’m just so hopeful that there’s going to be an opportunity to just to see women come to Christ.

I’ve listened to Revive Our Hearts, like, forever. It was like a lifeline for me when my kids were little. I just had it on. It came on at 9:30 on the radio, and I was always . . . It was just wonderful. One day heard on the radio that they had a Farsi ministry.

So Farsi is very close to Afghan Persia, which they speak Dari They speak multiple languages, but a lot of the people speak. And I said, “Wow! Wouldn’t it be awesome if one day we were using Bible studies in their native language?”

So I have a friend of mine that works with Revive Our Hearts. I said, “Hey, any chance there’s Bible study material with Revive Our Hearts in Farsi?”

“Well, there is!”

Seeking Him has been translated into Farsi. And so Revive Our Hearts, generously gave, we have at my friend’s house in Houston, a box of like twenty-five Seeking Him in Farsi.

I don’t know who’s going to use that. I don’t know when the Lord will open a door for that. But it is just so neat to see a ministry that I started listening to when I had itty bitty babies and was drowning in that stage of life. Those foundations set our family up to be able to do this now.

You can’t give out of what you don’t have. So, any work that we have done with refugees has literally come out of years and years of prayer and surrender and my own personal time in the Word of God. That has birthed it.

And now, this is a wonderful opportunity to serve and to share God’s truth that I’ve learned over the years and put as a foundation in our family. It’s, like, “Wow!” Now we have literally unreached people groups living in our country. A place where there were no known believers, and they’re living down the street from us. God has it for such a time as this that He’s just bringing the nations to our country.

I remember the specific date. It was January 3. It was a Monday and my kids were with my in-laws, so I had a day to myself. I was gonna have coffee, and I was gonna do my own things. Then I started getting messages that a couple of new Afghan refugees needed help.

I’m ashamed to say that I literally wanted to say to God, “Enough! Enough! I am spent out here. I don’t want to do that today. I’m tired of that. I’m tired of the needs. I’m tired of the emotional and spiritual drain. I don’t want to do that today, God. I just want to go and have my coffee and have my day because that’s what I’ve decided to do.”

But thankfully I had my time in the Word that morning. I yielded the day to the Lord. I was working in my kitchen, and I Revive Our Hearts came on at 9:30. She was talking about yielding your day to the Lord and allowing Him. He was very busy, and He had many things to do. And she said, “Do you ever feel like the entire community is knocking at your door, and you’re tired, and you don’t want to do it?”

I think I said out audibly, “Yes! Like, today is that day!”

But in that moment, though, she encouraged me. Like, “I have to yield this to the Lord. He will give me the time. He will give me the energy. I know He’s calling me to go visit these particular families today.”

One of the families is a family that I connected someone on staff with Revive Our Hearts with that lives in our city. That family that I met that day, where I wanted to be doing my own thing, was a family with four kids. The mom was pregnant, and they had an empty fridge.

And shame on me that I wanted to yield that opportunity to have a cup of coffee. I’ll get a cup of coffee the next day. That was a moment where, it’s like, you have these opportunities. God gives them to you. You either can go His way, and you can yield your rights. Or you can go the way of the flesh.

Jesus all the time was being pushed and pushed, but He was never frenzied. He was never frantic. He was never stressed out. He was never, like, “You’re annoying Me.” He ministered, and He knew who to go to because He had spent time away with the Father in the morning. And that fuels anyone’s ministry—refugees, parent, or otherwise.

So, yes, I’m really thankful for how Revive Our Hearts encourages you to stay in the Word, connected to God. And the rest of everything flows out from that.

Dannah: That’s Brooke Keeney, a woman who has said, “Yes, Lord!” to the calling God has put on her life: to show love to needy people arriving in her community.

All this month we’re going to focus on a theme of (un)remarkable women, that’s (un) in parenthesis. And what we mean is this: God can do remarkable things through women who feel pretty unremarkable.

Our team has written a book full of biographies of women who said, “Yes, Lord!” and then watched Him do remarkable things through them.

We’d love to send you that book and the new e-book of Volume 2 when you support Revive Our Hearts with a gift of any amount. Nancy’s back to remind you why your gift matters so much right now.

Nancy: If you’ve ever prayed for the ministry of Revive Our Hearts, or if you’ve ever given to support it financially, do you realize that you’ve played a part in Brooke’s story? God used this ministry as part of speaking to Brooke’s heart about His love for the nations. And He’s used you to play a role in the story that He’s weaving together among refugees there in Houston.

The reason Revive Our Hearts was able to pour into Brooke’s life was thanks to listeners like you who’ve prayed and who’ve given financially to support this ministry.

Well, there are a lot more women like Brooke, not only in Houston, but where you live and around this country and the rest of the world. They’re eager to learn about biblical truth and to put it into practice. We want to be there for them. We want to bless those women so they can be a blessing to others.

The month of May—it comes every year—and it’s always the end of our fiscal year. It’s a time where we close our accounting books on the previous year and make plans about what we believe the Lord is leading us to do in the coming twelve months. And it’s important that we end the fiscal year in a strong position.

So, we’re asking the Lord this month to provide $828,000 by May 31. That would be an unusual month, but we have an unusual God. And our team and I are believing that God can do that and meet those needs this month.

Meeting and exceeding that goal will help us continue making this podcast available to you. It will also help us continue expanding the ministry in Latin America, Asia, South Africa, Brazil, and other places around the globe.

So, would you ask the Lord how He might want you to get involved? Would you pray with us that He would put it on the hearts of listeners to give joyfully toward this opportunity, and that He would meet this fiscal year-end need? As we pray and give over these next weeks, I believe we’re going to see Him work in some remarkable ways.

If you’d like to be a part of helping to meet that need, you can visit us at ReviveOurHearts.com, or you can call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Thanks so much for joining us in what we’re seeing God do in the hearts of His women around the world. What a joy it is to partner with Him and with you!

Dannah: Are you ever tempted to think, I can’t be used by God. I’m too young, or I can’t be used by God. I’m too old?

Tomorrow, Nancy will combat that kind of thinking by showing us two biblical portraits. We’ll hear about a young woman and an older woman who God used to change the course of history. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is calling you to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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